This year marks the eighth year that WFF’s annual Earth Hour will take place. Millions of people around the world are expected to switch off lights in homes, offices and famous landmarks at 8:30pm local time for an hour on Saturday. "It's fortuitous timing that as millions of people take part in WWF's Earth Hour, the world's leading scientists release the latest IPCC report, which highlights the various impacts of climate change," said Colin Butfield, director of public engagement and campaigns at WWF-UK. "The significance of these two events is massive. Climate change is the biggest environmental threat facing our planet – it's real, it's happening right now, and we need to act fast." Among the world's famous landmarks that will dim their lights are the Empire State building in New York, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow, the Bosphorus Bridge in Turkey and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. In the UK, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham palace, Tower Bridge and the London Eye will all dim their lights. Earth Hour was original launched in Australia in 2007, WWF says Earth Hour has now grown to become the world’s biggest environmental event. Indeed, over 7,000 towns and cities in 154 countries took part in 2013. 2014 will see the launch of Earth Hour Blue, a digital crowd-funding and crowdsourcing platform which enables people to help raise funds and take action on a range of environmental issues. Earth Hour's CEO and co-founder, Andy Ridley, said: "For us the symbolism or turning your lights off will always be important. But the big thing for us has always been how to push it beyond the hour. The stage we're at now is to make it really easy for people from their handset, tablet or laptop to be able to do something pretty immediate to make a difference. That's the holy grail for us – building a global collective movement, far beyond the event, where the event becomes a kind of inspiration but the movement is really the essence of it." Some critics of Earth Hour have said that asking people to sit in the dark plays to "a widely held prejudice that 'the greens' want us all to go back to living in caves". But Ridley said: "A big part of Earth Hour is about empowerment – the idea that you as an individual can do something. It was extraordinary that first night looking out over Sydney and seeing a city go dark. And it wasn't about going back to the dark ages – it was an excuse to lean over the garden fence and talk to your neighbor or a reason for people to talk to each other at a restaurant, so I never underestimate the power of that symbolism."

It has recently been reported by the Politico that a coalition of companies, who call themselves the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE) are opposed to tariffs on Chinese imports. However, one company in particular, SolarWorld has an outstanding complaint with the Commerce Department. The complaint is with regard to the supposed production of solar cells in Taiwan and then assembling the panels in China, therefore utilizing a loophole on tariffs imposed in 2012. Due to the complaint process which the Commerce Department has to follow CASE’s can do very little to stop the complaint. CASE hopes that the White House will be able to use its powers of persuasion to bring SolarWorld to the negotiating table with the Chinese industry and other U.S. firms. “What we really want is the administration to reach out to SolarWorld and find out what they want,” said George Hershman, a vice president at the San Diego based company Swinerton Renewable Energy. CASE is endeavoring to show the White House that domestic solar manufacturing does not necessarily mean making solar panels. In the US nearly half of the solar workers are involved purely with installation, and another 30,000 work in manufacturing. The Commerce Department is expected to release preliminary tariff levels in June of 2014. Hershman added “if you haven’t written a check and purchased panels, you’re likely not getting them.” CASE is also working to build bipartisan support on the Hill for a letter to pressure the administration to take action.

The sake of residential solar storage systems in Germany are tipped to increase dramatically, with new figures projecting roughly 20-fold growth over the next four years. The research outfit EuPD, has led a study which has predicted a nationwide market of 100,000 units by 2018, up from 6,000 in 2013, citing falling PV prices as the “most significant reason” for this “monumental” commercial growth. The study was commissioned by the investment body Germany Trade & Invest (GTI). Germany’s “energiewende” has been a big contributor to the 80 percent fall in the price of solar modules, and the government is now looking at ways to bring down the costs of the next piece in the puzzle of its renewable energy transition – battery storage. During the first half of 2013, “energiewende” kicked off a program to finance the mass introduction of battery storage into homes and small businesses – a move which it has described as absolutely essential for the European region to successfully achieve, and move beyond, 40 percent of the market being penetrated by renewable energy. The first six months of the program were very promising, over 1,900 homes and small businesses had registered for government loans and grants which would facilitate the installation of battery storage in conjunction with solar systems in their homes. By November, approximately €32 million in loans have been allocated and €5 million in grants, and of those about ten percent of the allocated sums were in the initial phase of the program. Earlier this month, another EuPD report found that less than one-third of German PV installers are now offering energy storage options to their customers, with British and Italian counterparts to follow suit. The study also found that Germany has the biggest uptake of household energy storage systems due to the fact that a percentage of storage system costs were paid as a direct subsidy to consumers. Tobais Rorhacher, senior manager for renewable energies at GTI said “A battery is the next logical investment for owners of solar power installations and whose systems are coming to the end of their 20 year contract lifetime.” He added, ““Most of these systems will still produce electricity even after their 20 year feed-in tariff period.”

Google has recently announced that its goal is to run on renewable sources of energy, with the search engine’s operations around the globe already relying on solar energy and wind energy. Rick Needham, Google’s Director of Energy and Sustainability spoke with CNBC and said that the company is investing in increasing its 34 percent use of renewable energy to 100 percent. “That’s through a combination of renewable resources that are in the utility areas we operate, as well as the direct power procurements we’ve done,” he told CNBC. ‘Our goal is to be 100 percent renewable powered. There’s lots of challenges in getting there, not the least of which is operating in many jurisdictions that in different parts of the world.” Google spent over $2.25 billion last quarter on data centres and infrastructure, giving the company reason to use solar, wind and other renewable energies to cut everyday costs. Needham said, “We’ve invested over a billion dollars in 15 projects that have the capacity to produce two gigawatts of power around the world, mostly in the US, but that’s the equivalent of Hoover’s Dam worth of power generation.” Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station, which Google has recently opened, is located on federal land on the California-Nevada border southwest of Las Vegas. The field of mirrors rein in solar and cuts energy costs. “The fact is that all of these things, procuring power for ourselves, investing in power plants, renewable power plants, they all make business sense, they make sense for us a company to do. We rely on power for our business,” Needham adds. Other companies in Silicon Valley are as devoted as Google in investing in sources of renewable energy. “Silicon Valley is leading the charge to be more efficient, to work on solutions to some of these problems,” said BenSchachter, senior internet analyst at Macquarie Securities. “Google is ahead of the pack and we’ll have to wait and see how it works out. They are certainly trying many different initiatives to figure out how best to manage their footprint in the environment, as well as how to manage the cost of all their energy.”

Recently Houston-based Waste Management Inc. along with the oil and gas giant NRG Energy Inc. and two additional companies so as to form a venture dedicated to producing renewable fuels and chemicals. The four companies, including the Pasadena-based Ventech Engineers International LLC and energy technology company Velocys, based in Abingdon, U.K. partnered to develop smaller-scale gas-to-liquids technology using gas emitted from waste refuse in landfills. The vice president of corporate venturing for Waste Management, Joe Vallancourt, explained that the venture would take advantage of each of the company’s strengths: “Velocys’ leading smaller-scale GTL technology, Ventech’s engineering capabilities, and NRG’s clean energy development expertise.” The involvement of NRG would include the company’s ability to acquire large quantities of natural gas, and the company’s ability to transport the natural gas. Velocys, which has a presence in Houston, has developed a chemical reactor that mixes a number of gases produced by landfills and then continues to turn the gasses into liquid hydrocarbons. Due to its engineering background, Ventech, will be the engineering contractor on the project. With regard to landfills, Waste Management, will supply the landfills. The technology related to this new venture has been in use for over a year. Waste Management first facility demonstrating the technology has been running in East Oak landfill in Oklahoma. Although the facility has been running for a year, it is also under development. The venture is still considering whether to proceed with the project, and will decide later in 2014.